This precis was written by Democratic Audit’s editors: “The Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government recently appointed commissioners to run the London Borough of Tower Hamlets, following the publication of a Government-commissioned PWC report which was damning about the failings of the current adminstration, led by Mayor Lutfur Rahman. Michael Keith, a former Leader of the Council, argues that the affair highlights some inherent tensions in local and municipal government, which the Mayoral structure is ill-equipped to deal with.“

By Michael Keith

Competent bureaucrats commonly believe they protect the public interest by delivering transparent decision making in public institutions. This is commendable. Politicians normally believe that they are elected to carry out the wishes of their voters. This is forgivable. But these imperatives rub against each other when politicians try reshaping things in an image they prefer and the bureaucrat wants to preserve an order they recognize. This is difficult.

This tension is not new. Recent events in the east end of London exemplify an old problem. Max Weber’s thoughtful and commonly misunderstood discussion identifies this tension as one of the diagnostic features of bureaucracy. The bureau is in and of itself without politics. In a vocabulary anachronistic in its use and counterintuitive in its usage it might even be argued that Weber suggested bureaucracy was fundamentally anti-political.

The bureaucrat could serve the Chinese despot, the papal machine or the liberal democratic reforming state equally well. But at its best s/he personified a particular kind of stasis, a performative form of repetition without difference.

The bureau reproduces a specific social, moral and political order; dispassionately and without fear or favour or individual exception. This predictable repetition is at the heart of the bureau’s strengths. At its best it makes visible transparent process. But our conception of the ‘political’ is at heart about change, the juxtaposition of one moral order against another.

The politician – whether or not democratically elected – is for Weber a personification of the will to advance a preferred moral order and social settlement. A ‘conservative’ appeals to a particular set of pre-existing values threatened by social change, an alternative politics actively promotes a new moral order against an old one.

In cities of flux, characterized by high levels of demographic ‘churn’, migrant urbanisms and processes of regeneration and gentrification the social order is constantly on the move, generating particular challenges for the bureau.

Translated into local government, the most conscientious political actors become engaged in representative democracy for a reason. Councillors normally want to change things in the ward and the local authority they represent. They identify needs, community organisations they believe are doing good things unnoticed, campaigns they want to champion. Such interests sometimes can be advanced through the bureaucracy.

But such interests at other times have to be championed against the bureaucracy. Domestic violence only becomes an ‘object’ of local governmental gaze when community organisations campaign for it to be recognized. The consequences of an ageing population with multiple challenges are only recognized by welfare departments after a lot of knocking on doors at city hall.

And in multicultural settings both entrenched forms of systemic racial disadvantage and a politics of recognition of cultural difference depend on changing the local state to recognize properly the different needs of cultural groups and evolving and at times banal demographics.

In my own experience the mums’ clubs based in certain locations and the provision for the elderly that once appealed effectively to a past East End tradition of gathering, music and alcohol based conviviality worked accidentally to exclude those who did not gather in pubs, did not socialize around a cup of tea and a cigarette after dropping the children at school.

So the bureau only recognizes and changes with pressure. Multicultural realities challenge and change the bureau, belatedly some times, proactively when politcians advance in good faith an understanding of the complexities of new social formations through the architecture of city hall.

But such change is never without friction.

Such tensions can be constructive. But in British mayoral systems we are unsure what the proper checks and balances should be.

In Tower Hamlets when the will of a people so diverse, so rich and poor, so much a mix of different cultures is personified by one man, the challenges are particularly acute.

Price Waterhouse Coopers last week reported to Secretary of State Eric Pickles a situation that led the Secretary of State to suggest that the report “paints a deeply concerning picture of obfuscation, denial, secrecy, the breakdown of democratic scrutiny and accountability, and a culture of cronyism risking the corrupt spending of public funds.”

The report highlighted that in Tower Hamlets the three most senior bureaucrats are all on temporary contracts. The boss (head of paid service), principal lawyer (monitoring officer) and head of finance (section 151 officer) are insecure. They depend on political whim for their pay cheque.

The checks and balances for a mayor in one of the most socially polarized parts of Britain are diminished. As PWC suggest and illustrate by one example after another the result in today’s east end is potentially catastrophic.

This is why we need to think carefully how checks and balances for elected mayors should work, in the east end and elsewhere.

On the BBC Radio 4 Today programme on 13th November (and in other media) reports on recent events in Tower Hamlets have focused on whether or not there has been criminal behavior reported by PWC.

Former Mayor of London Ken Livingstone and former MP for Bethnal Green and Bow George Galloway, both supporting Mayor Lutfur Rahman, curiously mirrored the framing of BBC journalist Zoe Conway in focusing on the issue of criminality and fraud.

But this is a chimera. If the report is judged by whether criminality or fraud is eventually proven, if the mayoralty is judged by convictions in court, misses the point.

The true message of the PWC report and the lesson for putative mayoral innovations, in Tower Hamlets, in Manchester and elsewhere is that if the proper checks and balances on deliberative democracy are not in place then the result is dysfunctional, opaque and – most importantly – to the detriment of democracy and the disadvantage of local people.

It is why most people will welcome the potential role of three commissioners in east London that might mitigate the questionable deployment of democratically elected but executively absolute power in today’s Tower Hamlets.

Like this:

29 Responses

Tower Hamlets under Keith’s tenure was truly a bastion of good governance and propriety.

But on a serious note I’m surprised he buys the fairly unintelligent analysis that somehow this is all to do with elected mayors.

In a DEM council executive decisions are taken either by the Mayor in Cabinet (ie we can all which him but cabinet cannot vote) or the Mayor (personally).

In a traditional model they’re all taken by Cabinet in public. But in all modern London borough councils, Cabinet is essentially useless. It is whipped and while you get a few platitudes from members they vote the same way on all matters. Real discussion has taken place on sofas beforehand.

So if we had a traditional model, all decisions would be in cabinet and they’d get to vote on these matters. Which cabinet members do you reckon would have rebelled? Yes, there would be no private ‘Mayoral executive decision making’ but (1) most of the decisions we’re talking about were in Cabinet anyway and (2) of the ones that weren’t which we can all read online many are pretty menial and does anyone believe they’d have been decidedly differently if they had been?

Not universally supportive of DEMs but they’re largely a red herring here.

The plus side is of course that you have greater actual accountability as no-one ever recognised their traditional council executive but everyone knows who Lutfur or Robin Wales is – so the election is actually about whether your supporters outnumber your supporters outnumber your detractors, and in both cases cited they appear to. Arguably outweighs the small advantage of the traditional model whereby theoretically all matters are ‘voted’ on.

So will you be voting for a Presidential model for the UK with Parliament demoted to lapdog status?

The great advantage of the traditional model for Councils is that each and every Councillor counted for much more. Plus there was much more discussion about policy and plans. Or have you only known Councils with massive majorities where all decisions were taken in Group?

In those Councils where the majority is not overwhelming, the leadership has to listen to everybody. As opposed to the DEM model where the Mayor seems to only take notice of the pals he likes and his sponsors who are not elected in the first place.

The MAJOR problem with the DEM model is that the scrutiny and accountability side of things needs to be beefed up when you get a situation where the Mayor chooses not to play by the rules.

I’m very much in favour of the Parliamentary model – especially the bit where their model of accountability results in resignations when things go wrong.

What Minister would have stayed in office if their Department had been exposed as doing some of the things which are being revealed in reports by the various activities of Tower Hamlets Council?

Before Blair local councils didn’t have the “cabinet” model and neither did they have the “mayoral” model… Unless they were places where only one party won any seats they worked through dialogue and ordinary councillors contribution counting for something. Blair’s head would be good atop a pike.

The question on the streets that everyone is asking is WHERE ARE THE COMMISSIONERS? It’s a phony war.

Not just with massive majorities- I’ve observed councils in no overall control. No debate or voting in their two-party cabinet either. If the cabinet model anywhere offers more than a rubber stamp I’d be surprised but no doubt you can link me to some minutes evidencing this.

No, I wouldn’t have a President. In fact, the only advantage I identified of DEMs doesn’t apply to the national picture. The democratic deficit of people not knowing who their local councillors are or how the council works is far more prevalent than people not knowing who their Prime Minister is and needing his work to be clearly signposted for accountability. If anything, it’s the other way around – people arguably put too much weight on the PM’s work – for good or ill – at the expense of good local representation.

And that ‘major problem with DEMs’ – surely it’s just as possible that the Leader would choose not to play by the rules?

The cabinet model is arguably the most dangerous of all since as I have outlined it allows everything that is possible in DEM councils with none of the accompanying greater public accountability. Personally, I’d be more in favour of the committees model which Prescott foolishly binned but some councils are reintroducing.

Directly elected mayor is a “job for life” like an MP in a safe seat. (I’m not saying Lutfur is in a safe seat).
This means that the mayor is a dictator who can impose her will without the distraction of keeping her colleagues on board.
This can be useful if the area is particularly volatile or if there is a big job to do, such as making the northern cities (Man to Leeds) into a 2nd capital.
It’s not good for democracy.

‘The true message of the PWC report and the lesson for putative mayoral innovations, in Tower Hamlets, in Manchester and elsewhere is that if the proper checks and balances on deliberative democracy are not in place then the result is dysfunctional, opaque and – most importantly – to the detriment of democracy and the disadvantage of local people’.

When we cut through the Weberian sociobabble it would seem, at least to me that Mr Keith is saying this. Mayoral systems can work well where there is a normal political concensus and, while there are faults with both, does so in Hackney and Newham.

No one seems to have noticed any change in Hackney and while Robin Wales has been accused of being somewhat dictatorial he has introduced the first licencing scheme for private Landlords in the country and cracked down on the multi-culti nonsense of translating everything into the dozens of languages spoken in the borough and providing interpreters for all who either can’t or won’t learn English.

The problem with Tower Hamlets is that as Oscar Wilde was not as other men it is not as other boroughs. We have a situation where the bulk of the non Bangladeshi population have effectively disenfranchised themselves because they see no point in voting and they have a point. Even under Labour, politics was effectively run from from Mosques, Madrashers, the smoke filled front rooms of influential Bangladeshis and restaurants after they had closed. The present system is simply that writ large in terms of the obvious corruption with a good dose of Islamism thrown in.

No political system except the one we are about to see with the appointment of outside commissioners can deal with that system of power and patronage where jobs and grants are dished out on the basis of how many votes can be brought by the receivers of municipal largesse.

To a certain extent this system has pertained in Tower Hamlets from day one. For the best part of forty years power was divided between the Murphia and the Kosher Nostra, the Irish and the Jews. What differs today is that whilst previous power brokers could abide by certain rules and conventions Lutfur Rahman believes, or seems to, that he can do anything he likes and, until recently, he could.

Had he played the game a little better he could have been Mayor in perpetuity but he was carried away by his own success, his control of Town Hall and the Bangladeshi media and the apparent support of the liberal left. One of his main props was the fact that everyone from the Guardianista caffe latte crowd who hate Nu Labour and Blair more than they do the Tories to what remains of the Trotskyist/Stalinist left saw Rahman as true Labour standing up to the Blair/Brown/Miliband dismantlers of the welfare state who also went around invading Muslim countries.

Like the king in Hans Christian Anderson’s ” The Kings New Clothes” he began, I think, to believe the rhetoric of his non Bangladeshi apologists. He sees himself, and to judge by his latest missive in The East London Advertiser as recently as last week, as the subject of a hate campaign, ” this attack is political not procedural; the main parties are lining up to attack the borough that has put up heavy resistance to austerity”.

His defenders basically claim that he is under attack because he has successfully fought against austerity with an added dash of Islamophobia thrown in for good measure. For them, all allegations of fraud,nepotism and jobbery are lies and, that good old fall back, smears to undermine a successful and popular democratically elected leader who has stood up to the establishment. An establishment they claim is straining at the leash to privatise heath and education, slash Rahman’s massive house affordable house building programme and take away the EMA. Yes, they really do, or rather did.

As the corruption has become more and more public and the issue of Tower Hamlets a national as opposed to a merely London parochial one, his apologists have very largely folded their tents and slunk away into the night. First to go was Jon Lansman the editor of MP Michael Meacher’s increasingly paranoid site Left Futures. It should also be remembered that Lansman was one of the authors of the longest suicide not in history AKA Labour’s 1982 manifesto.

Various Guardianista type scribes have offered support and or excuses but by and large even the Polly Toynbee/ Seamus Milne set have decided that maybe there is something rotten in the state of Tower Hamlets and the issue and Rahman have now become non subjects with a bit of airbrushing going on in so far as it is possible. Watch out for a bit of editing of publication lists and CVs.

The last two men standing are both has beens, Livingstone and Galloway of whom it could be said that at this stage of the game with friends like them who needs enemies. The bigger picture is that while Rahman is essentially finished, his ability to dispense patronage now largely if not totally ended, what will the debacle do for Miliband and Labour?

On the platform at the Water Lily were two prominent members of Labour’s National Executive Committee, Livingstone and Shawcroft. They have openly broken the rules of the party, the former on a number of occasions, and both seem to be getting away with it. If polls are to believed Labour is either neck and neck with the Tories or slightly in front. Miliband however, even to die hard Labour supporters, just doesn’t look like a Prime Minister. If he doesn’t move against Livingstone and Shawcroft and do it soon he will face a barrage of Tory propaganda in a few months that he is a weak leader afraid to confront the far left on his own NEC.

Innocent Abroad. I am sure you are quite aware of what I mean. In the nineties Hackney was pioneering all of the PC nonsense that Livingstone would introduce at the GLC and became as much of a laughing stock. Had Pickles been around with the powers he has I am sure commissioners would have been put in.

The article is quite right that in government (central or local) there needs to be a bureaucracy which gets on with delivering the services and a political class to set the vision for the direction in which services should be moving.

It is, of course, ironic that Eric Pickles himself has long been an open advocate of getting rid of local authority chief executives. He is on record as saying that he cannot see the point of having a mayor and a chief executive, particularly in councils with the elected mayor model. He has said that the function of both roles could be carried out by the mayor alone – causing howls of anguish from those who actually work in local government across the country that he has completely failed to understand the nature of the two roles. I don’t think even the experience of Tower Hamlets has changed his opinion on this.

This article could usefully be put in front of him to spell out to him precisely why a CE needs to be in place in local government.

“Max Weber a German sociologist propounded the theory called principle of bureaucracy – a theory related to authority structure and relations in the 19th century. According to him, bureaucracy is the formal system of organization and administration designed to ensure efficiency and effectiveness. He suggested an ideal model for management as bureaucratic approach. He, in the book the theory of social and economic organizations, explained the basic principles of bureaucracy. He gave emphasis on division of labor, hierarchy, detailed rules and impersonal relations.”

Does anyone more aware of the machinations of the London Labour Left know anything about this?

I occasionally have a look at the site of the deranged former Ken Livingstone employee Bob Pitt and his http://www.islamophobiawatch.co.uk. Amongst the usual rants is a totally distorted article about events in Tower Hamlets which he claims he got from Labour Briefing. I googled the site but can’t find the article. Is this what used to be Left Labour Briefing?

I think the praise I want to give this piece is that it’s highly literate – I won’t say it’s well written. But it is rather ivory tower talking of ‘the bureau’.

I know Michael Keith’s been out of the council for 8 years but he fails to see that the political culture in TH Council and the mayoral set up mean a number of council officers, and not just the Murziline Parchments and holders of other politicised posts, have now become Lutfur’s cronies, keen to do his bidding.

Why else do we still receive East End Pravda each week with Lutfur’s smiling face in it? Why else has the council launched spurious legal challenges to DCLG’s moves to rein Lutfur in? Why else have dodgy grants been given?

Any decent council officer set-up would just tell Lutfur ‘no’ – but its recognised at senior officer level that if Lutfur doesn’t like them, they’ll go the way of Kevan Collins et al, and that Lutfur has decided he won’t like officers who don’t play crony.

It’s both highly literate and well written if a bit academic and verbose, but as I said it’s academic and they speak a different language to us lesser mortals. After all, all professions are a conspiracy against the laity.

Quite what the authors’s eight years out of office have got to do with anything I don’t know. As far as I know he is still in the Labour Party, lives in the borough and follows events closely. I am none of those things and I know what’s going on.

The issue of council officials bringing Rahman to book is a non issue and makes this post have no point. The fact that Rahman has near dictatorial powers coupled with the fact that many council officers up to the highest level are Jobsworths means that Rahman can do what he likes.

In the last sentence that is admitted so what is the point of the post? As Michael Caine might have said, “Talk about stating the bleedin obvious”.

Dave Roberts aka Terry Fitzpatrick aka madmullahofbricklane is back to spout his usual, meaningless nonsense. Were you serving a custodial sentence for your criminal convictions?

As for Michael Keith, why on earth does he stick around like a bad smell? People of TH rejected him when he tried to get re-elected onto the council.

Has-beens like Keith, Biggs come back time and time again, because they are bitter, spiteful. They detest Lutfur, because they think either them or their ilk should run TH. Instead of being constructive and letting Lutfur run TH, they will make snide remarks, conspire behind the scenes and make life difficult for Lutfur. For goodness sake, if you have something to say about Lutfur’s policies, say it. Let the people hear it. It is not his policies that they have a problem with. They have a problem with Lutfur. Biggs is taking part in the election petition in a hope that Lutfur will get ousted. Keith is now blaming the mayoralty system that elected Lutfur. Pathetic!

When madmullahofbricklane disappeared from this blog, we thought you were either in prison or we managed to get rid of you. Now, you have reincarnated in the form of Dave Roberts!

Terry Fitzpatrick, we can read you like book although the cover has changed. We know that you are ashamed of who you are and that’s why you keep denying your own identity. Giving out dodgy email adds will not help your cause mate!